The present invention is directed to the use of computers in writing Geez or Ethiopic, which is the alphabet on which Ethiopian writing is based. Ethiopic or Geez is one of the world's most ancient alphabets and languages. According to the beliefs of the Ethiopian Orthodox church, Ethiopic has a special place in biblical history. The first human to use the alphabet is believed to be Henoch of the Old Testament. Henoch, the Seventh in line from Adam and Eve and the great grandfather of Noah supposedly wrote the Book of Enoch in Ethiopic. Ethiopic is an ebugida meaning that each symbol represents a consonant and vowel combination. The symbols are organized into classes and orders of similar symbols, which are associated with similar sounds. The symbols are organized on the basis of both the consonant and the vowel. Ethiopic is written left to right across the page. These Ethiopic characters have evolved over time from more ancient forms.
There is archeological evidence that the proto-Ethiopic alphabet existed before the 9th century BC especially during the D'mt Kingdom in Northern Ethiopia. The ancient character set existed as the Heleheme series having only a first order. The first and last syllographs of Geez, “He” and “Pe” are relatively the same in Ancient Egypt as the first and last main Hieroglyphs. The order of the Geez system has remained the same for roughly 3000 years. Some believe that the first character set was an ebugida. Others even claim that the classic Ethiopic with its seven vowel expansions was in existence before 3000 BC. Still others claim that Ethiopic is a Sabean alphabet. It is thought by some that it was during the Axumite Kingdom of around 340 AD that the alphabet gained the vowel forms and started to be written from left to right.
Translation of Bible books into Ethiopic, the ancient Semitic language, contributed to the development of the syllabic alphabet. Gradually, the Geez language started to die out and now remains as a liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Around the 13.sup.th century AD, Amharic became the dominant language. As a result, more characters were added to Geez primarily through the influence of the Hamitic languages. In the 1800's the Bible was translated to Amharic and later to Tigrigna and Oromo languages. Since then Ethiopic has added more characters as more languages began using it.
The introduction of the printing press around 1900 encouraged the proliferation of books. Books and newspapers were printed using type-setting technology. Type-setting provided a fairly faithful reproduction of the Ethiopic characters, which prior to the introduction of the printing press, were written by hand. Around 1920 Ayana Birru introduced the Amharic typewriter, which consisted of a modification of the print head of the familiar English typewriter. While the Amharic typewriter allowed for a widespread production of printed documents, it was not without drawbacks. In particular, using the Amharic typewriter, glyphs were produced by a complicated series of the partial glyphs successively typed over the top of each other. The glyphs thus produced were merely an approximation of the true hand-written Ethiopic characters, which were more faithfully reproduced by a printing press. Thus, despite its utility, the Amharic typewriter, led to the proliferation of sub-standard characters and incomplete Amharic sets.
With the advent of computer technology, it became possible to efficiently produce printed documents having Ethiopic characters without the use of a printing press. Early attempts at adopting computer technology for this purpose, did not use the true Ethiopic characters, but instead used glyphs similar to those produced by the Amharic typewriter. Accordingly, the full range and variety of Ethiopic characters were not expressed.
With improvements to computer technology, it became possible to more faithfully render the true Ethiopic characters. While the problem of rendering true characters had been solved, the problem remained of specifying all the characters using the standard QWERTY keyboard or on an abbreviated keyboard, which may be used in for a cell phone or tablet device for example. In particular, Ethiopic has approximately 564 characters, all of which cannot be typed using a standard keyboard, which has far fewer keys. Several schemes have been developed to address this problem. All the schemes developed so far are complicated and non-intuitive and require many keystrokes per character. Accordingly it would be desirable to have an improved system for entering Ethiopic characters into a computer using a standard QWERTY keyboard or other abbreviated or expanded keyboard.
With the globalization of the world economy and with the ease of communication due to the internet, people are able to communicate throughout the world. Some languages, for example Ethiopic, utilize a phonetic set of characters. The characters in Ethiopic are related to each other. For example, the Ethiopic character for the sound “Ha” is “”, while the Ethiopic character for “Ho” is “”, which is a slight variation. Other languages utilize a similar character phonetic system where, for example, a consonant, a vowel or a combination of a consonant and a vowel are represented by a set of characters.
An example of current problem with typing Ethiopic that has been there online, for example www.lexilogos.com/keyboard/amharic.htm. At the site, one cannot type some words. For example, words like “” typed with “tzta” on the lexilogos website. The “tz” spelling combination relates to an Ethiopic “” character and inserting the “” with a mouse from the list of Ethiopic glyphs on the page is equally useless as any “tz” becomes “”.
Another example of current problem with typing Ethiopic is available at www.amharicdictionary.com. While using this website, the word “teegsst” which is “” illustrates an example where there is interference in the method. When the “t” and the “e” characters are entered a different character shows up where the character for the “ee” character “” has been mapped. In order to type the “” character, which is the character for the sound “t” using this website, one would start by entering the “t” keystroke, which renders the “” character. The next character happens to be a vowel sound mapped to the “ee” position. When the user presses “e” in hopes of getting the “” character, it does not appear. Instead, the first character, “”, is replaced with “” and the second “e” generates the “”. This first character manipulation is caused by the mapping of the keys and the typing method. There is nothing to tell the program to not change the first character and render a second character without entering a stop key, such as the space bar. However, when the user presses the space bar, a space appears between the first character and the second character. The website recommends that the word “” or similar words are typed with a space between the “” and the “”. The user then must go back and remove the extra space. This method requires at least four keystrokes in order to render two characters.
Another example is the Gate2Home website available at gate2home.com/Ethiopic-Keyboard. Here to write the same word “teegsst” in Ethiopic “”, a user would first hit the “t” character and the program renders the appropriate character “”, only this time, the character is highlighted. If the user now enters the keystroke “o”, the highlighted character “” changes to “” instead of rendering the desired character “”. If the users want to move on to the next character, they must remove the highlighting on the character by either using a mouse or by using the arrow key. Thus, this method also requires at least four keystrokes in order to type two characters (one to render the first character, second keystroke to remove the highlighting, third keystroke to render second character, and fourth keystroke to remove highlighting).
Another example of a prior art method is illustrated in the Amharic Wikipedia website available at am.wikipedia.org/wiki/. It is believed that this website uses the System for Ethiopic Representation in ASCII (SERA) to spell out Ethiopic characters with English characters. This webpage illustrates the issue that characters are not settled, even after a period of time. For example, if the character “” is present on the screen and an editor goes next to space adjacent to that character and presses the “a” letter, the character “” changes to “”. This change is because the SERA program does not settle the first character. Rather, it is always available to change to other order character using a second keystroke. Thus, the document is never complete and remains in limbo indefinitely.
Thus, a need exists to render a phonetic character using few keystrokes and settling the characters on a document so that they cannot be manipulated over a period of time.